More Than Marks
The first time I encountered a formal marking rubric, My immediate thought was ‘this will slow me down’.
I had been marking student writing for years. Without consciously referring to any criteria, I could tell within minutes whether a piece deserved a 5 or a 7 out of 10. I had my own internal standards like clarity of meaning, flow of ideas or maybe the errors that actually impede communication. I didn’t need a rubric. Or so I thought.
What changed my mind was not a rubric itself but what happened when I had to teach with one.
As ESL instructors, we had to prepare students for IELTS as they needed a certain band score to get into their chosen colleges. I was new to IELTS teaching. So first I had to learn the descriptors myself and then teach accordingly. Learning the descriptors changed how I thought about teaching writing. For the first time, I had a shared language with my students, concrete criteria we could both refer to before, during and after writing. Later, when I joined the assessment team, we had our own rubrics designed for each level. We used to train teachers how to use them and maintain the marking standard.
Even when writing had no grammar or spelling mistakes, something could still be missing, what I called expression. Weak or strong, it made a real difference to the quality of writing. When students asked why I had deducted marks despite having no errors, I told them there is always room for improvement. Many weren’t satisfied. And perhaps rightly so, because I couldn’t explain clearly what I meant by expression.
Rubrics give us criteria for fairer, consistent marking. They make expectations visible both for students and teachers. But going back to where I started, there is always something in student writing that resists a rubric. Sometimes it is the flow of ideas that catches you or maturity of expression that no descriptor can name. In those moments, you have to be instinctive. The rubric makes way for you but at times you have to stop and judge. That judgement comes form years of reading, teaching and paying attention.
Perhaps that is the purpose of rubrics. Not to replace but support your built-in instinct as a seasoned writing teacher, to give new teachers a framework while they develop these instincts and to remind experienced teachers that what they carry inside them has a name, even if it took a rubric to show them that.